Biographie d'Oswald Mosley

Born in London on 16 November 1896 and deceased in Orsay on 3 December 1980, Oswald Mosley was a British politician, leader of the British Union of Fascists from 1932 to 1940 and of its successor, the Union Movement, from 1948 until his death.

Born into an old and wealthy family, Sir Oswald Mosley was educated at Winchester College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

At the age of eighteen the First World War broke out and he served in the Sixteenth Lancers in France and then in the Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner of the RAF.

His experiences during the First World War had a profound effect on him, shaping many of the views that he took into politics.

He joined the Parliament of London as a Conservative in 1918 and joined the Labour ranks in 1924. He was a member of the 1929 Ramsay MacDonald government, but was not included as a minister of the Cabinet. He then belonged to the left wing of the party and was singled out by denouncing the "excessive" timidities of the government program in social and economic matters. Irritated and discouraged by the democratic game, he became gradually attracted by the fascist ideas he had long laughed at. Resigned from the government in May 1930, he was initially the ally of a few left-wing socialists like Bevan or Strachey, who abandoned him as soon as his new ideas became evident. He lost his seat in Parliament in 1931.

In October 1932 he published The Greater Britain and defended a policy of authoritarian reform, a corporatist system and vigorous actions in favour of the Empire. This was the moment when he gave the name of the British Union of Fascists to his organization, founded on March 1st 1931 under the name of the New Party. Initially inspired by the Mussolini example, the Union evolved under the influence of Hitler, whom Mosley met, admired, and to whom he borrowed the themes of racism and anti-Semitism. As a great speaker, Mosley succeeded in seducing a fraction of the masses, affected by the global economic crisis, and attracted also by the paramilitary character of the new party. Mosley also enjoyed the support of some newspapers as the Daily Mail during the first years. However, it will never count more than 20,000 supporters and will only be able to hold limited fiefs, including some parts of the East End of London. By advocating physical violence against his political opponents and covering individual aggression against Jews, he worried all parties and gave rise, from 1936-1937, to a democratic defence legislation. Then, his party declined rapidly and was already moribund when it was dissolved in 1940. Imprisoned during part of the war, Mosley was freed as early as 1943.

In the fifties, he tried an impossible return to political life, always in the name of his old ideas.

Indeed, he made his reappearance with the publication of The Alternative, which laid the foundations of the Union Movement founded on February 8th, 1948. The newspaper Action reappeared and the new movement took part in the elections with rather low results (but never less than 6%), with some points at 33% in 1953 in Moorfields and 20% in 1968 in Bethnal Green. Ideologically, Mosley became the apostle of "Greater Europe". He published The National European and The European, which led him to work first

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